TY - JOUR
AU1 - Foale, Mia
AB - Emily Jenkins presents a compelling argument for the location of art within politics. Tracing the work of Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies within twentieth-century Spain, Jenkins interrogates the relationships between art, affect, emotion and narrative, providing an interdisciplinary study of the artist’s role in the formation of modern Catalan and Spanish national identities. In the introduction Tàpies is situated within a canon of renowned Spanish artists, and a broad survey of Catalan national identity and the wider histories of twentieth-century Spain is also provided. Jenkins lays out a complex web of personal, public, historical, national and theoretical narratives, whilst maintaining a sharp focus on key research questions, including ‘why has Tàpies’s art become iconic in Catalonia?’ (p. 1), ‘what were the sociopolitical circumstances that affected the artist’s ascent to prominence?’ (p. 2), ‘how does context affect his artworks’ reception?’ (p. 2) and more broadly, ‘how does political art impact national thought?’ (p. 2). The book’s coverage is admirably comprehensive, particularly considering the lack of substantial scholarship on Tàpies. This expansive review of Tàpies’s work and political identity, combined with a clear research agenda, continues across the book’s six chronological chapters. Each chapter investigates broad questions illustrated by in-depth analysis of Tàpies’s art, including his paintings, murals and sculptures exhibited within Catalonia, Spain and internationally. This analysis is grounded in theoretical and historical debates, building upon the works of prominent theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Murray Edelman, Michael Billig, Alejandro Quiroga and Archilés Ferran. The first two chapters cover Tàpies’s early stylistic development and his mid-career in Catalonia, contextualized by Spain’s transition from Franco’s regime to democracy. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the relationship between artists and public institutions, furthering the complexities of artistic creation, production and exhibition, and their relations to nationalistic preoccupations concerning language, education and economics. Chapter 5 develops these complexities, using the final years of Tàpies’s career and his posthumous retrospectives to demonstrate how different historical contexts can affect the presentation of art. This chapter’s conclusion returns to the importance of Catalan identity and nationalism in relation to the practices of artistic production and exhibition, a theme that continues into Chapter 6. In this final chapter, the comprehensive research sources of previous chapters – including archives, libraries, newspapers, documentaries and interviews – are broadened, incorporating self-identification data analysis to measure public perceptions of Catalonia and its relation to Spain. As the volume progresses, the scope of research becomes more impressive, whilst maintaining focus on its initial investigative questions. Jenkins excels most when she returns to the book’s opening preoccupations: her writing mirrors the historical trajectory of Tàpies that she seeks to represent, as she returns to the same ideas and reconsiders them through shifting contexts and narratives. Jenkins provides not only a remarkable overview of Antoni Tàpies’s career, but also an exemplary case for interdisciplinary enquiry, encompassing a large range of sources and a methodology that evaluates the personal, political, artistic, national and communal as holding equal weight in the wider field of cultural studies. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights)
TI - Jenkins, Emily. The Visualization of a Nation: Tàpies and Catalonia
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqac058
DA - 2023-01-09
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/jenkins-emily-the-visualization-of-a-nation-t-pies-and-catalonia-1ToN0XJ47J
SP - 527
EP - 528
VL - 58
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -